Amanda Hickey

Amanda Sanford Hickey (28 August 1838 – 17 October 1894), was an American surgeon, obstetrician, and physician who practiced medicine in Auburn, New York. She was the first woman to earn a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Michigan Medical School. Early life and education Amanda Sanford Hickey was born into a Quaker family on 28 August 1838 in Rhode Island. After the death of her father, she moved with her mother to Scipioville in Cayuga County, New York and attended the Friends' Academy in Union Springs, New York. After graduating from the Friends' Academy, Hickey spent a year studying Greek and earning money from the cultivation of a vegetable garden. She then began working as a teacher at the Hawland School in Union Springs, while studying medicine on her own. In 1868 or 1869, Hickey enrolled in the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she studied for one year. She interned at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, where she studied obstetrics under the instruction of Lucy Ellen Sewall and Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska. Her colleagues at the hospital included Emma Louise Call and Eliza Mosher.